PSE Pressures Bellevue with its Energize Eastside Timetable Before People Might Learn of its Sordid Past (and Present)

So far, the City of Bellevue has not once told PSE to back off from its rush to get Energize Eastside built on PSE’s timeline, regardless of the many key questions PSE stubbornly refuses to answer. In his presentation to the Bellevue City Council on January 12, 2015, Larry Johnson for CSEE asked the council to impose as many moratoria as needed until PSE provides complete and credible information. In other words, Bellevue needs to set the agenda and timelines, not PSE.

Johnson recited a list of PSE’s past and current misdeeds that demonstrate it is a serial bad actor that cannot be trusted. Below is that list, including the Attorney General’s lawsuit filed last month against PSE forovercharging its customers $35 million a year, and the potential fines and shutdown of PSE’s dirty coal Colstrip plant in Montana that accounts for nearly a third of the energy it sells us. With the possibility PSE could go bankrupt from lawsuits and fines and the possible shutdown of Colstrip, no wonder PSE is trying to pressure Bellevue as EIS Lead Agency for all 5 cities to get its bloated, unnecessary project permitted ASAP.

2013: PSE fined again $275,000 for violating gas-safety rules when responding to gas leaks in Seattle, where due to those violations a family’s house exploded — fortunately, nobody was killed;

2014: just last month, December 14, the Attorney General sued PSE, claiming this “private utility’s … profit margins are unjustifiably high. Customers are collectively being overcharged by about $35 million a year.”

Ongoing: PSE generates nearly a third of the energy it sells to ratepayers via the Colstrip dirty coal plant in Western Montana, making PSE a major air polluter and the 8th largest greenhouse gas emitter in the U.S.

Click here for a print version of Johnson’s presentation where he also chides the Bellevue City Council for not adequately engaging with citizens on this critical project and not giving informed citizen action groups the same time and access granted PSE. Here is also a video of this presentation: